Motivating Teens

[Heike Philp]

Recording: http://lancelot.adobeconnect.com/p42395458/  (1h)

 

My talk will demonstrate a number of motivating activities and tasks for teenage students that support the increasingly popular belief that moving away from using a particular coursebook can benefit the learning process. I will talk about negotiating a syllabus with students, initially built up using the common grammatical, lexical & skills elements from several sources.

I will look at how, by not having to follow and adhere to a dense coursebook-based syllabus, teachers are more able to do the following things:

• Personalise the course and make it more relevant to their students. 
• Allow more time for students to generate their own content thereby giving the teacher much more to go on when deciding what student X or student Y needs to do to improve.
• Experiment with the greater variety of web 2.0 tools for learning that encourage the learning experience to go beyond the restrictions of a typical 3 hours tuition per week.

I will show how these elements allow teachers to foster a greater level of responsibility on the part of the learner and thereby encourage students to develop and review their own learning aims.

Bio

Paul Braddock has worked at the British Council in Barcelona since 2005. He is a senior teacher / administrator responsible for co-ordinating & delivering regular in-house training. Additionally, he is jointly-responsible for co-ordinating the integration of  ICT into the school’s syllabuses. He has previously worked for the British Council in Portugal & Hungary, and has previously worked as a language teacher in Japan, Poland & the UK